Sandra Villata

The strong/weak island distinction 

A large-scale acceptability judgment study in English

Islands are sometimes divided into two types: strong islands that block extraction of all dependency types, and weak islands that selectively block certain dependencies, such as simple wh-items (what), but not others, such as complex wh-items (which book). Recent experimental studies provide preliminary indications that the strong/weak island distinction for simple and complex wh-items might be gradient: the extraction of complex wh from weak islands partially reduces the island effect, but does not eliminate it entirely. Given the far-reaching consequences that these findings would have for theories of islands, and for the architecture of grammar in general, I present results from a large-N acceptability judgment study aiming to assess the facts for a wide range of islands in English: 33 island types spanning 7 island families. We tested ~13000 English native-speakers (~200 per island/wh-type), and we used Bayesian modeling to estimate posterior distributions of island effect sizes. Results show that amelioration, when present, is indeed partial, and that some islands show patterns not previously reported. I discuss the consequences of our results for the several theories of islands (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, processing-based) and I conclude with some speculation about how both categorical and gradient theories might be adapted to account for these.